EARLYBIRD

Pundits & Editorials

• "Not so fast, everybody. Rand Paul can't abruptly disavow the extremist views on civil rights that he's been espousing for years and expect us all to just move along. Was he lying then? Is he lying now? Or has the Tea Party movement's newly crowned Mad Hatter changed his mind?" muses Eugene Robinson.

• "It's worth noting that the only people who are really jazzed to reopen the argument about the Civil Rights Act are liberals," observes Jonah Goldberg. "And they have good reason: They won that argument, politically and morally."

• "Americans are upset with almost every major institution out there. In 2006, a Democrat could run as an outsider even if he or she was a banker or member of a corporate board. Try doing that today," writes Amy Walter.

• "The Republican Party's hopes of retaking Congress rest on its ability to convince conservative and independent voters that the GOP will restore fiscal discipline if trusted with power this fall," argues Marc Thiessen, while making the case for earmark reform.

• "Traveling along the Gulf Coast, past idled boats with names like Big Shrimp and Blessed Assurance, past dead trees and hurricane fortifications and other signs of the area's perpetual vulnerability, you can't help but wonder how a company like BP, with its awful record of incompetence and irresponsibility, was ever allowed to drill for oil a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico," writes Bob Herbert.

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• "The real causes of the" Deepwater Horizon disaster are "much deeper," contends the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert. "Having consumed most of the world's readily accessible oil, we are now compelled to look for fuel in ever more remote places, and to extract it in ever riskier and more damaging ways."

• "Millions of Americans are out of work, the budget deficit is in the trillions and Europe is flirting with economic collapse," writes Dana Milbank. "Fear not, says Larry Summers, the chief economic adviser to President Obama. It is merely a 'fluctuation.'"

• "I keep reading how" Connecticut Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal "betrayed a generation of young men who actually fought. Maybe. But he certainly betrayed those who would not," writes Richard Cohen.

• "The conservative blogosphere is buzzing with outrage over plans to build a 13-story mosque and Muslim cultural center just a few hundred feet from Ground Zero. As a resident of lower Manhattan, I see it differently," writes Bret Stephens (subscription).

• "North Korea's nuclear-weapons capability undergirds its belief that it can commit acts of aggression with impunity and therefore shows unambiguously why we must stop Iran," writes former U.N. ambassador John Bolton in the Wall Street Journal (subscription).

• "The rise of shale gas, which can be used to produce electricity, reduces dependence on domestically produced, but dirty, coal. If cars powered by electricity or gas improve, shale gas would also reduce reliance on Middle Eastern oil," writes Gideon Rachman (subscription).